I really loved it. The film and theatre refs and following the internal lives of the main characters and the actorly insight into the Hollywood industry machine. Superhero powers and how they would impact real life is such an interesting question for tv and film to ask after decades of fantasy-based Marvel productions. It is the big plot hole or reality check that I often ask myself when watching superheroic fantasy films where the ‘gen pop’ (as the film set assistants call us in Wonder Man) are also featured going about our daily lives.
I also recommend She-Hulk on Disney Plus for thinking about the same questions, don’t listen to the sexists who didn’t like it. She-Hulk had more fantastical superhero elements to it than Wonder man. SH also includes other superhero characters which makes it more of a midway between reality and fantasy. I loved the female perspective, insight into sexist legal culture and trolling and the horrible incel bro culture in SH, and that it was the first show I’d seen focused on exploring how you live in the normal world as a person with superpowers.Wonder Man feels like a further development of that exploration of reality vs the superhero universe.
Impressed that Disney are making this excellent Wonder Man with Haitian-American family life central to the story, at a time when Trump is victimising and harassing Haitian people in the U.S. and their children right now.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-blocks-trump-administration-from-ending-temporary-protected-status-for-haitians
There’s various points in Wonder Man when you realise that the platform of movie success could make some people so visible, and loved, that other darker forces may be less able to reach them. The family life shown on Wonder Man feels like it gives a bit of meta comment about that, which I liked.
The fact of making a male-led tv show (Wonder man) when a female-led movie series is much more well known (Wonder woman) is also heartening. Normally it would be a female character led spin off movie being made off the prior success of a male-led character franchise. Maybe Marvel is employing more women writers and producers these days?
There is a nice nostalgic local cinema motif in Wonder Man about how important those family trips are to kids, which made me feel a bit sad in these days of unaffordable cinema ticketing due to the cost of living and the loss of small local and independent cinemas in the UK.